Spinning Beach Ball & bouncing Icons...

Question - I have had my iMac for about 6 months. I never got the spinning beach ball untill after about two months of use. I now see it fairly often, but not a problem - just for a few seconds - it has occassionally gotten a little frustrating. - Now I notice that some applications are also taking a little longer to launch and the icons don't bounce like they used to before opening.

I guess my question, since I am a long time PC user at work - could the iMac be getting corrupt data collected in it because of increased use or perhaps my stupidity that may be causing a little confusion in the system? It seems that all my past PC's have slowed like this.

I have run anti-virus etc., and no problem there- is this just to be expected over time?

Try running the cron scripts and then do a permissions repair.
If you are unsure of what exactly these things are and how to perform them, then search the forum for either topic and you will get many good threads explaining them.

:black:

This shouldn't be expected if you haven't changed anything. It may be caused by more running processes have you added dashboard widgets, or maybe new applications that sit in the menu bar?

Otherwise, open Activity Monitor and sort by CPU use, descending. This will show you the busiest processes - something may be stuck. Alternatively, sort by Size (virtual memory size) descending and it will tell you if something is sucking all your RAM. You can then either restart it, kill it, or whatever.

What Devilboy suggested should speed things back up for you unless you have so many process's running that you are running low on RAM. Try repairing permissions first then the Cron Scripts.